Canadian tech firm CGI at centre of U.S. Obamacare glitch

A Canadian information technology giant is under fire for its role in a glitch-riddled website that is the centrepiece of U.S. President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform policy — an online portal which experts say will require as much as double its original budget to fix.

The health insurance exchange at healthcare.gov, for which a subsidiary of Montreal-based CGI Group Inc. was contracted to help build and provide information technology and technical support, has been plagued with delays since it launched on Oct. 1.

In its first few days after startup, of the millions of Americans who rushed to sign on under the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, only a trickle successfully got through — in the “single digits”, as one insurance official told the Washington Post.

Technology experts have criticized the rollout, design and even the basic programming of the portal, called the Federally-Facilitated Marketplace, and pointed to the rush to introduce it by the Oct. 1 deadline as part of the problem.

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“It’s a classic case of a badly-managed project,” said Bill Curtis, executive vice president and chief scientist at CAST software, a U.S. software analysis and measurement company. “And it’s not all CGI, it’s the government putting something out there before it’s ready to go.”

Revisiting the project to fix glitches, rather than doing it right in the first place, could double, or even quadruple the original amount, he added.

“Going back inside to rejig this thing is going to cost a fortune,” he said. “It’s going to cost a lot more than whatever they estimated. When you put people in a rush, they start making mistakes and don’t have time to find it.”

CGI Federal Inc., a subsidiary based in Fairfax, Va., was awarded a US$93.7-million contract over two years to help design and develop the federal insurance exchange.

CGI declined a request for comment. But, in September, CGI Federal Inc.’s senior vice president Cheryl Campbell, was “confident” for the portal’s launch in her testimony in front of the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health.

“CGI Federal is confident that it will deliver the functionality that CMS has directed to enable qualified individuals to begin enrolling in coverage,” she said, according to government documents.

As of March 2013, the company had been paid US$87-million for its work, according to a June Government Accountability Office document on the project.

And yet, despite the millions of Americans clamouring to sign on via healthcare.gov, the website was only ranked 381st among American websites on Thursday, according to online metrics company Alexa.com.

Issues plaguing the website could originate from how the original contracts were awarded during the U.S. government’s IT procurement process, said Tom Lee, the head of Sunlight Labs, the IT arm of Sunlight Foundation which advocates for government openness and transparency.

The process favours the lowest bids, but the officials who vet contractors, and budget amounts, rarely have technical knowledge in that particular field, he said.

“There’s a real lack of technical expertise in government,” he said. “The people running it are experts in the procurement process, but they may not be technical experts who are able to effectively manage the process, and vet the kind of proposals that they’re getting.”

William A. Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institute, says it doesn’t appear the online exchange was adequately tested before it was launched, but it was an incredibly complex system that is difficult to design.

“I find it difficult to believe that the administration didn’t engage talented and experienced people to create what’s arguably the most consequential piece of information technology in the history of public policy,” he said.

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